We saw passing some corps de reserve approaching by forced marches to the theatre of war; the Cossacks were repairing, one by one, to the army, without order or uniform, with a long lance in their hand, and a kind of grey dress, whose ample hood they put over their head.  I had formed quite another idea of these people; they live behind the Dnieper; there their way of living is independent, in the manner of savages; but during war they allow themselves to be governed despotically.  One is accustomed to see, in fine uniforms of brilliant colors, the most formidable armies.  The dull colors of the Cossack dress excite another sort of fear; one might say that they are ghosts who pounce upon you.

Half way between Kiow and Moscow, as we were already in the vicinity of the armies, horses became more scarce.  I began to be afraid of being detained in my journey, at the very moment when the necessity of speed became most urgent; and when I had to wait for five or six hours in front of a post-house, (as there was seldom an apartment into which I could enter) I thought with trembling of that army which might overtake me at the extremity of Europe, and render my situation at once tragical and ridiculous; for it is thus with the failure of an undertaking of this kind.  The circumstances which compelled me to it not being generally known, I might have been asked why I quitted my own house, even although it had been made a prison to me, and there are good enough people who would not have failed to say, with an air of compunction, that it was very unlucky, but I should have done better to stay where I was.  If tyranny had only its direct partisans on its side, it could never maintain itself; the astonishing thing, and which proves human misery more than all, is, that the greater part of mediocre people enlist themselves in the service of events:  they have not the strength to think deeper than a fact, and when an oppressor has triumphed, and a victim has been destroyed, they hasten to justify, not exactly the tyrant, but the destiny whose instrument he is.  Weakness of mind and character is no doubt the cause of this servility:  but there is also in man a certain desire of finding destiny, whatever it may be, in the right, as if it was a way of living in peace with it.

I reached at last that part of my road which removed me from the theatre of war, and arrived in the governments of Orel and Toula, which have been so much talked of since, in the bulletins of the two armies.  I was received in these solitary abodes, for so the provincial towns in Russia appear, with the most perfect hospitality.  Several gentlemen of the neighbourhood came to my inn, to compliment me on my writings, and I confess having been flattered to find that my literary reputation had extended to this distance from my native country.  The lady of the governor received me in the Asiatic style, with sherbet and roses; her apartment was elegantly furnished with musical instruments and pictures.  In Europe you see every where the contrast of wealth and poverty; but in Russia it may be said that neither one nor the other makes itself remarked.